Anyone has insights on which of these networks really have gained a strong, stable user base? I hear a lot on mastodon for instance, is it really becoming bigger or staying very niche?
I would say that they all have stable user bases which is nice to see. Though some are weighted towards different niches. I recommend checking them all out.
Mastodon picked up some new and very stable communities, but it’s still quite small. I can’t imagine Mastodon dying now, like I could imagine for Bluesky (or even Threads) for example, some of the userbase is very committed to it.
If you’re plugged into one or two of those communities Mastodon will absolutely replace Twitter for you. If your community isn’t strongly represented, it can feel dead. You need to follow more people on Mastodon than you would elsewhere to get a good experience, and discovering those people can be hard.
Anecdotally, a significant chunk of my Twitter follows set up shop on Bluesky as a contingency but few of them are actually active on there. Twitter is clearly degrading but it hasn't degraded enough to break the momentum it has, at least not yet.
I know it is not what you are exactly asking but one metric is the Google Play Store download counts where Threads is by far the most popular:
Bluesky: 1M+ downloads
Mastodon (official client): 1M+ downloads (there are multiple clients but most downloaded one is probably the official client)
Threads: 100M+ downloads
As a user of Mastodon and Threads, I feel like Threads has the most active user base and also it is possible to find more popular or official Twitter users on Threads as well. The biggest lacking features are trending topics and DMs. Also the video player features are annoyingly lacking, can't even pause a video on web player. If they can implement these features quickly I think it is a viable alternative to Twitter/X.
I recently got invitation for Bluesky and briefly tried it, but unlike Threads, I couldn't find anybody who I was following on Twitter. Also it was a bit hard to discover new people, so I just left.
Depends on your community, probably, to some extent. Most people I followed and engaged with on Twitter are now on Mastodon; a few are, inconveniently, on Bluesky instead (I can't get the hang of Bluesky's client, so mostly stick to Mastodon-only). But that's going to be really variable depending on the circles you moved in on old-Twitter.
I'm not convinced that there will be one replacement-Twitter; historically with dying social networks that usually doesn't happen. Livejournal people mostly didn't flee to Dreamwidth (the Livejournal clone), say; they went to Tumblr or twitter or various other rather dissimilar social networks. I think Digg->Reddit is possibly the _only_ major example of a drop-in replacement working out.
For people interested in writing, tech or code, Mastodon has so many posts that I cannot hope to keep up with them all. I used to be able to scroll to the end of several interests quickly, even if I hadn't logged in for a few days. There's also tons of visual art, lots of science communication and just general folk chatting, quipping and shitposting.
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